Archive for June, 2005

The Wait is Finally Over

Posted 6/27/2005 By Jason

It is official, I am now a Zend Ceritified Engineer. To quote my notification:

Dear Jason Sweat,

Congratulations on passing the Zend PHP Certification exam!

As a Zend Certified Engineer you are now among an elite group that leads the
growth of PHP.

Now I should figure out how to work this logo into my WordPress theme 😉
ZCE Logo

I took the exam one morning during the php|tropics conference. There was a recent thread on SitePoint where I mentioned what I thought about the exam itself (my post is #46). Many thanks to Marco for footing the bill for the exam.

Looks like Paul read his email before me and got “first post” in the blogosphere from the newly minted php|tropics ZCEs.

I am a Statistic

Posted 6/25/2005 By Jason

I followed up on a post from Ben Ramsey on a MIT survey of bloggers, and did my part to contribute to science 😉

Take the MIT Weblog Survey

A New SitePoint Mentor

Posted 6/22/2005 By Jason

As stated in this thread, SitePoint has a new Mentor… me :) This means I get this shiny orange badge Mentor Badge above my avatar. In order to maintain this honor, I have to continue to be adicted to the SitePoint forums (in particular, my favorite the PHP Application Design forum), and I have to continue to behave myself.

Hopefully this will in some small way give back some to the community which has given me the opportunity to get to know several people whom I now consider good friends: Marcus, Harry, and Jeff.

Offical Patterns Book Announement

Posted 6/21/2005 By Jason

The book is getting closer. Yesterday we had an official announcement on the php|architect website, which pointed to the order page. It looks like Marco is giving a 10% preorder discount, so everyone should order 10 copies today, and effectively get a free copy. 😉

I would have also emphasized unit testing in the blurb. While there are a few PHP books out there which have chapters or sections on unit testing, I don’t believe there is any other book which emphasizes the practice as much as I have. Unit tests are not only present in the code download for each chapter, but are integral to the explanations in each chapter as well. Many times when I present examples of working code, it is within the context of a unit test. I also tried to explain the basics of Test Driven Development, and have a few examples shown using TDD iterations.

The Adapter chapter is off to layout so we are down to the last few chapters! I am really looking forward to holding the dead tree edition :)

The Specification Pattern

Posted 6/15/2005 By Jason

Last night I sent my chapter on the Specification pattern in for layout. This passes the > 50% mark for chapters through editing and off to layout as well.

This chapter was fun to write because it strays a bit from the Gang-of-Four/Fowler PoEAA design pattern mainstream. Fowler has written some articles on this pattern and Eric Evans covers it in some detail in “Domain Driven Design”. I first show a “hard-coded” example, and then a parameterized specification which can take a WACT DataSource object as the item being tested. The last example in the chapter shows how to create a composite structure of concrete specification objects to act as a “Policy”.

The chapter is an evolution of some early work I did with the Specification pattern in this thread.

By popular request, here is the complete table of contents:

  1. Preface
  2. Programming Practices
  3. The ValueObject Pattern
  4. The Factory Pattern
  5. The Singleton Pattern
  6. The Registry Pattern
  7. The MockObject Pattern
  8. The Strategy Pattern
  9. The Iterator Pattern
  10. The Observer Pattern
  11. The Specification Pattern
  12. The Proxy Pattern
  13. The Decorator Pattern
  14. The Adapter Pattern
  15. The ActiveRecord Pattern
  16. The TableDataGateway Pattern
  17. The DataMapper Pattern
  18. The Model-View-Controller Pattern
  19. Conclusion

Appendices:

  1. Patterns Quick Reference
  2. SimpleTest Testing Practices

update: Had some funny characters in my summary, removed them to see if it helps peoples feeds.

Happy 0xA B-day PHP!

Posted 6/8/2005 By Jason

Chiming in with the chorus, many thanks go out to Rasmus, and every other contributor to PHP, for creating a phenomenon.

Following the tradition of the other PHP anniversary posts:

What was I doing 10 years ago?
I was working for a small engineering firm in Iowa doing process control work in the steel industry. Our control system used artificial neural networks to optimize the control of electric arc furnaces. This work expanded into SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) and led eventually to me displaying this process control data on web pages via ASP and IIS.

When did I get involved with PHP?
In 2000, I was looking for a free—as in beer—way to create dynamic web pages for a partnership whose accounting I maintain. My UNIX administrator at work turned me on to the LAMP stack and I have never looked back. I have brought PHP into use for both web page development and batch scripting at work, and have written several articles, books and numerous presentations on PHP.

Happy birthday PHP, and many happy returns. Thank you PHP team for endless hours of toil.